Southern Democrats

Southern Democrats are members of the U.S. Democratic Party who reside in the American South.

In the 19th century, Southern Democrats comprised whites in the South who believed in Jeffersonian democracy. In the 1850s they defended slavery in the United States, and promoted its expansion into the West against northern Free Soil opposition. The United States presidential election of 1860 formalized the split, and brought war. After Reconstruction ended in the late 1870s they controlled all the Southern states and disenfranchised blacks (who were Republicans). The “Solid South” gave nearly all its electoral votes to Democrats in presidential elections. Republicans seldom were elected to office outside some Appalachian mountain districts and a few heavily German-American counties of Texas.

The monopoly that the Democratic Party held over most of the South first showed major signs of breaking apart in 1948, when many Southern Democrats, dissatisfied with the policies of desegregation enacted during the administration of Democratic President Harry Truman, created the States Rights Democratic Party, which nominated South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond for president and Mississippi Governor Fielding L. Wright for vice president. The “Dixiecrats” managed to win many Southern states, but collapsed as a party soon after the election. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from the Southern state of Texas, led many Southern Democrats to vote for Goldwater at the national level. In the ensuing years, the increasing conservatism of the Republican Party compared to the liberalism of the Democratic Party led many more conservative white Democrats in the South to vote Republican. Many continued to vote for Democrats at the state and local levels for years after. By the start of the 21st century, Republicans had gained a solid advantage over Democrats at all levels of politics in most Southern states.

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